In the brick-and-mortar world, showrooms, galleries, and stores are used to display furnishing, interior accessories, fashion, art, antiques, or other objects. Shopping centers, malls, and main streets are constructed to aggregate a large number of stores. The on-line equivalent of such commerce components are constructed with database containing information for such objects or stores sorted with nesting categories. The objects in conventional cyber stores, galleries, and show rooms are represented on the client/user computer screens as index lists of textual or thumbnail entries. The stores in a conventional cybermall are represented by a collection of “banner” entries (see FIGS. 1A1, 1A2, 1B, 1C1, 1C2, 1C3, 1D1, 1E1, 1E2, 1E3, 1E4, 1E5, 1F). Thumbnails are small graphical representation of an object, serving as an index and a link to detailed information regarding the object. Banner is a small graphical box-like icon with the logo and name of a business entity on the Web Clicking on a thumbnail usually brings an enlarged photograph and/or descriptions of the object from the server database to the client/user's computer screen. Clicking on a “banner” brings the user to the home page of the business entity the banner represents.
A typical on-line gallery or store, for example, would show category titles of the gallery collections or store items, with some textual entries or graphical thumbnails of selected “featured” exhibits or items. When a particular “last stop” category on a particular categorical path is clicked, the items or objects sorted under the category are presented in an index list of textual one-line or thumbnail entries. The index could be very long, and partitioned into many web pages (each may be several print pages long), accessible on-web page-at-a-time. Clicking on a textual or thumbnail entry or brings detailed textual description and an enlarged version of the thumbnail, if available, again only one-at-a-time (see FIGS. 1A1 and 1A2).
Virtual Reality software, such as Apple Computing Quick Time, or Macromedia Flash, on the other hand, has been developed to show scrolling panoramic views of a room or a scene, or to rotate a three-dimensional object to show its 360-degree views. The Virtual Reality source data is typically prepared by shooting multiple still photographs of a room, a scene, or an object from sequentially varying angles, and re-compose the still photographs in the correct spatial-time sequence to form a contiguous panoramic view. Video filming can also be used. Viewing the Virtual Reality image at the viewer's computer screen is controlled by the “mouse,” a computer input device (see FIGS. 2A, 2B, and 2C) and the control buttons on the VR “viewing window” on the computer screen. The panoramic view of a scene is scrolled across the viewing window. The still shots from sequentially varying angles of a 3-D object is “flashed” onto the VR viewing window, producing an illusion of the object rotating in the window, given a large enough number of still shots, and fast enough speed of spatial-time re-composition or “flashing.”
Virtual Reality has not been used in actionable on-line or electronic commerce environment, except for viewing purposes only, such as displaying a property or a house on-line on Real-Estate listing sites as in FIGS. 2A, 2B, and 2C; or, rotating a 3-D object, such as a car on car sites; or, for other purely entertainment purposes, such as displaying the content of a museum. In all cases, the Virtual Reality graphical data packet is treated as a single data entity with a single “packet address,” accessed by clicking a VR or 3D button, and viewed by controlling the temporal scanning or rotation using the control buttons on the computer screen in conjunction with the button on the input device, the mouse. From within the Virtual Reality data packet, there is no link to the external world outside the data packet. Therefore, there is no practical application other than its visual and entertainment value. One cannot do anything with the Virtual Reality presentation of the known-art, other than looking at it and enjoying it.
The present invention relates to methods and apparatus to construct and display electronic/cyber/on-line showrooms, galleries, stores and malls to emulate the physical brick and mortar world, in additional to the conventional category and index listing e-commerce construct of the Web. Virtual Reality (VR) shots and/or Video films are made to visually present a show room, gallery, store, or object with more resemblance to the physical world we live. Each still picture of the VR shots or each frame of the video film is given a unique frame address. Each significant and unique object in the VR data packet is given a unique identification, indexed and addressed by the area the object occupies in a picture or a frame. Links are associated with each such object, such that detailed information (such as graphical, video, audio, or textual descriptions) related to the objects stored external to the VR date packet, can be retrieved from the database on demand, when the objects in the VR images are “selected”/“clicked.”